5 ms·

I'm not sure I understand the use of tmux. Can someone explain why it's essential to their workflow and why it might end up being essential to mine?

spudlyo 2y ago
Tmux provides a means multiplexing a single terminal window into multiple terminals, either full screen, or like a tiling window manager. It lets you organize and label these terminals and provides a very flexible keyboard interface to terminal management, including history scrollback, search, etc. I started using GNU Screen in the early 90s, and over the years I have developed a keyboard muscle memory for managing multiple terminals in this fashion that is completely independent from whatever terminal program I'm using. This allows me to utilize this keyboard muscle memory if I'm using iTerm2 on macOS, Windows Terminal, or Alacrity on Linux. Many fancy terminal programs offer some subset of these multiplexing features (like tabs) and such, but in my experience none of them are as configurable or as feature rich as Tmux.
- lynndotpy 2y ago
  It's also very good if you're SSHing over an unreliable connection. The tmux terminal doesn't break when your connection does.
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    I use tmux, but as far as unreliable connections, I've found mosh[0] to be the best solution to the problem (when you have the ability to install it). It basically runs a background process on connection not tied to the session that your client will automatically reconnect to if the connection fails. I regularly close my laptop, travel between home and work, open it back up and the connection is available almost instantly. [0] https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/
    - oxygen_crisis 2y ago
      Both together are even better... seamless persistence of your session across sleeps/connection lapses from mosh, and from tmux for everything else like switching client machines, a dead battery, a client's OS/terminal crashing, etc.
      - michaelmior 2y ago
        Absolutely. I personally prefer to use both together.
  - adamomada 2y ago
    This is exactly the same reason I had in the 90s using tmux’s precursor, GNU screen. With dialup or crappy isdn, screen -R was always the first input after login Have we gone from shitty connectivity to stable and then back to shitty?
    - jprete 2y ago
      I don't think so! But tmux is really useful for laptop scenarios, like when the laptop goes to sleep, or if you're working on a train and it goes through a tunnel with no network reception.
    - elcomet 2y ago
      I still use screen, is tmux better?
      - Groxx 2y ago
        By a decent measure, yes. It's screen plus modern QoL additions like multi-panels/windows/tabs and a giant pile more, and it's decades-stable so that's not like a "node framework of the week" pile of useful stuff that you'll have to rip out next month. It's very firmly established as a full screen successor. For strictly "keep one thing running remotely" it's not much different (screen is entirely fine), but for "do work remotely" it's like comparing `cat` and `less`. One does what the other does and a heck of a lot more that is very useful when you need it. Sure, you can use grep, but having an integrated (reversible) incremental search is hard to truly replicate from the outside. Tmux is kinda on a similar level vs screen. Personally fwiw: I almost exclusively use tmux with iterm's integration, so I don't have to learn basically any of it. I just get resumable terminal tabs and windows when I ssh anywhere, and they're still there months later when I go back. With that kind of setup it's just plain magic, a complete no-brainer, feels like what computing just obviously should be (even though it isn't). I've learned enough of the details around screen/tmux/etc to know that I'm glad to shove almost all of it over there and ignore it.
    - technofiend 2y ago
      It's handy even if you just need to go from work to home to Starbucks or whatever. Doesn't have to be a poor connection as much as one that changes occasionally.
  - Ferret7446 2y ago
    You can use shpool for this if you aren't using the other features.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
chrisamiller 2y ago
At any given time, I'm working on like 10 different projects. tmux lets me set up sessions for each of these projects, so that when I leave one and come back in a week, all the context is there (multiple windows, bash history, working directories I was in, etc) Since I work with big biological data, most of my work takes place on our university cluster, which means my laptop is just a dumb terminal and all of the action takes place on the server. IME, tmux is especially powerful with coupled with mosh, which gives a persistent SSH connection. That means I can be in the middle of a project, close my laptop lid, go home, then later that evening, open my lid and everything is reconnected and just right there. Same if I reboot my laptop - one command to reconnect my terminal with mosh, and I'm back in the middle of my complicated multi-window project.
- trentnelson 2y ago
  What happens when you press page up or down in tmux? Have you configured it to scroll page up & down? Or do you do that via Ctrl-B ] or whatever the magic incantation was?
  - necrotic_comp 2y ago
    That's right. You have a prefix that lets you use page up page down in any pane you've got currently selected.
  - donio 2y ago
    Not parent but keybindings are fully configurable. For example to scroll up with Shift-Pgup: bind -n S-PPage copy-mode -u bind -T copy-mode S-PPage send -X page-up bind -T copy-mode S-NPage send -X page-down The first line is a top-level binding to enter copy-mode and immediately scroll up one page. The other two add bindings within copy-mode so you can continue to scroll up or down with those keys. I also have a small hack in my .zshrc to start scrolling up with `M-v` (like in Emacs) while at a shell prompt: tmuxup(){tmux copy-mode -u} zle -N tmuxup bindkey '^[v' tmuxup
    - seanhunter 2y ago
kabr 2y ago
Saved terminal state. Multiple tabs. Can log off and come back and everything’s there. tmux and mosh are game changers, especially while tethering/roaming and switching networks.
- Groxx 2y ago
  Maybe one of the missing pieces here for anyone not terminal-fluent: Normally, when you lose your ssh connection to another machine, it'll kill your scripts, drop all the output into /dev/null, and you can't get any of it back. Because that's how a remote terminal normally works. So even brief connection issues are a major headache, much less known stuff like "close your laptop and resume after lunch". Tmux gets you what you would expect instead from a "remote tab" thing. Stable, reconnectable, still exists when you're not connected, etc. There are other options of course (there always are), but tmux does it all and it's an industry standard.
- cxr 2y ago
  That should be table stakes at this point; these features should be built into all conventional desktop terminal emulators. I shouldn't have to run a second, inferior text mode terminal emulator inside the terminal emulator app that ships with my preferred desktop environment (and deal with the conflicts/impedance mismatch that falls out of this pairing). Pretty nuts that so many desktops and independent modern terminal emulators lag so far behind GNU Screen, which was first released in 1987.
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    Personally I'd much rather run that server-side. I use iTerm which has a lot of great features for session management, but I like being able to connect from any machine and keep the exact state I was in rather than having it tied to my local client.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    I prefer tmux because I can run it on servers/remote machines too. It doesn't require X so runs perfectly and happily on headless machines. Can also be nested. I'm all for adding those features to the terminal emulators, but it will never meet and certainly not exceed tmux in flexibility, power, portability, and compatiblity.
PhilipRoman 2y ago
Aside from tabs/panes/persistence already mentioned, it serves as a portable, programmable layer that will work anywhere, whether on the client or server side. I set up my key bindings once and now they work over SSH from Windows, local terminal emulator, on a Linux framebuffer console or even through a serial port. While I do use a tiling/tabbing window manager, tmux is just really good at what it does so I still keep using it for my terminals.
bee_rider 2y ago
It provides all of the useful functionality of a window manager (hosting multiple terminals) but you can run it in a terminal.
freedomben 2y ago
lots of good answers already. my tldr: it's a terminal-agnostic tool to split a window vertically or horizontally so you have multiple shell sessions on the same screen (and can move between them). Lots of other great reasons too but that's the major one IMHO.
michaelmior 2y ago
Personally I find the small shell function below really helps my tmux workflow. Run it with no arguments and you'll get a list of available sessions. Run it with a session name and it will start the session if it doesn't exist or reattach if it does. If you're already in one tmux session, it will just switch over your client to that session. The function below will also automatically detach other clients, but for me it's what I want since other clients are always just me on another machine, often with a different screen size. tm () { if [ -z $1 ] then tmux list-sessions return fi tmux detach -s $1 2> /dev/null if [ -n "${TMUX+1}" ] then tmux switch-client -t $1 2> /dev/null || tmux new-session -s $1 else tmux attach-session -t $1 2> /dev/null || tmux new-session -s $1 fi }
- artemave 2y ago
  I have a better version (in the sense that it automatically names sessions after the current directory): if [ -z "$1" ]; then name="$(basename $PWD)" name="${name//\./-}" else name=$1 fi tmux has -t "=$name" && tmux attach -t "$name" && exit tmux new-session -d -s "$name" -n shell
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    Better is subjective. This version has no way to easily list sessions. Depends on what you want :)
arlort 2y ago
Plenty of great use cases have already been pointed out, but what I also love is that sometimes I get carried away and use the close window keybind on the wrong terminal, with tmux set to create a new session when the terminal is launched (which isn't closed unless all shells in the sessions have excited) I just use a keybind to spawn a terminal attached to any unattached sessions and never again have to recreate 10 different panes in different working directories on different windows Also let's my colleagues monitor my builds on our shared server pretty easily and it's better than screen sharing
mostlysimilar 2y ago
I like tmux for keeping a remote session open but I don't use it for my local machine. On my local machine the only thing it would really buy me are tabs/split panes, and iTerm does those things natively and far better than tmux does.
TheAdamist 2y ago
I find the split screen capability very useful for terminal use, but i'm only a more basic user
jeppester 2y ago
A use case I haven't seen mentioned - from skimming the comments, is that multiple users can connect to the same tmux session. It does a good job at scaling the session to fit the size of each client's terminal window and has multiple scaling options available. In my experience it works way better than for instance terminal sharing in VS Code.
aloer 2y ago
Anyone here who can answer this as well in the context of local work on a Mac? I manually use tmux when sshing into servers but usually that’s one session split in two and that’s it. Locally I use iterm2 with a single hotkey window but multiple tabs with one per project and then up to 8 panes per tab. These stay open for many months until the inevitable restart for system updates. I feel like I have pretty good persistent terminals this way. But would there be any benefit for me using tmux locally? I know that iterm2 has some kind of integration with it but I‘ve not tried that
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  I don't use tmux but I use screen which AFAIK is the same basic functionality on my Mac. I use it to run long lasting software during development, so the frontend and backend of the service I'm developing for example, since they have hot-reload. It's not _necessary_ but it's nice knowing I can close my terminals without worrying of having to wait for another 10m build because I like to keep my open windows to a minimum. I think it's really down to how you use your computer more than a real need.
- rewgs 2y ago
  > These (tabs and panes) stay open for many months until the inevitable restart for system updates. And iTerm won't have a way to restore them, right? The `tmux resurrect` plugin can save and restore all your sessions, even after restarts. At the moment I have 45 tmux sessions running and I'm not worried in the slightest about not being able to pick up exactly where I was for every project. Also, tmux is a nice way to "bury" your "windows." Hiding an iTerm window can only be done by covering something with it or minimizing it, but a tmux session can be detached from/attached to at will, and when you're detached it doesn't add cruft to your window management.
- biftek 2y ago
  I use tmux basically the same way but prefer tmux sessions because I find tabs hard to navigate reliably. With tmux I can assign a name to each session, list all sessions, and have keyboard shortcuts to take me to a specific session or create it if it doesn't already exist. <leader>+J always opens projectfoo, <leader>+K projectbar, etc. With tabs you need to know which tab contains what and what order everything is in.
mason_mpls 2y ago
tmux + vim with some plugins is a really good developer experience, it makes it really easy to leverage command line tools
digitalsushi 2y ago
why would you want browser tabs?

spudlyo 2y ago

Tmux provides a means multiplexing a single terminal window into multiple terminals, either full screen, or like a tiling window manager. It lets you organize and label these terminals and provides a very flexible keyboard interface to terminal management, including history scrollback, search, etc. I started using GNU Screen in the early 90s, and over the years I have developed a keyboard muscle memory for managing multiple terminals in this fashion that is completely independent from whatever terminal program I'm using. This allows me to utilize this keyboard muscle memory if I'm using iTerm2 on macOS, Windows Terminal, or Alacrity on Linux. Many fancy terminal programs offer some subset of these multiplexing features (like tabs) and such, but in my experience none of them are as configurable or as feature rich as Tmux.

lynndotpy 2y ago
It's also very good if you're SSHing over an unreliable connection. The tmux terminal doesn't break when your connection does.
- michaelmior 2y ago
  I use tmux, but as far as unreliable connections, I've found mosh[0] to be the best solution to the problem (when you have the ability to install it). It basically runs a background process on connection not tied to the session that your client will automatically reconnect to if the connection fails. I regularly close my laptop, travel between home and work, open it back up and the connection is available almost instantly. [0] https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/
  - oxygen_crisis 2y ago
    Both together are even better... seamless persistence of your session across sleeps/connection lapses from mosh, and from tmux for everything else like switching client machines, a dead battery, a client's OS/terminal crashing, etc.
    - michaelmior 2y ago
      Absolutely. I personally prefer to use both together.
- adamomada 2y ago
  This is exactly the same reason I had in the 90s using tmux’s precursor, GNU screen. With dialup or crappy isdn, screen -R was always the first input after login Have we gone from shitty connectivity to stable and then back to shitty?
  - jprete 2y ago
    I don't think so! But tmux is really useful for laptop scenarios, like when the laptop goes to sleep, or if you're working on a train and it goes through a tunnel with no network reception.
  - elcomet 2y ago
    I still use screen, is tmux better?
    - Groxx 2y ago
      By a decent measure, yes. It's screen plus modern QoL additions like multi-panels/windows/tabs and a giant pile more, and it's decades-stable so that's not like a "node framework of the week" pile of useful stuff that you'll have to rip out next month. It's very firmly established as a full screen successor. For strictly "keep one thing running remotely" it's not much different (screen is entirely fine), but for "do work remotely" it's like comparing `cat` and `less`. One does what the other does and a heck of a lot more that is very useful when you need it. Sure, you can use grep, but having an integrated (reversible) incremental search is hard to truly replicate from the outside. Tmux is kinda on a similar level vs screen. Personally fwiw: I almost exclusively use tmux with iterm's integration, so I don't have to learn basically any of it. I just get resumable terminal tabs and windows when I ssh anywhere, and they're still there months later when I go back. With that kind of setup it's just plain magic, a complete no-brainer, feels like what computing just obviously should be (even though it isn't). I've learned enough of the details around screen/tmux/etc to know that I'm glad to shove almost all of it over there and ignore it.
  - technofiend 2y ago
    It's handy even if you just need to go from work to home to Starbucks or whatever. Doesn't have to be a poor connection as much as one that changes occasionally.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  You can use shpool for this if you aren't using the other features.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

chrisamiller 2y ago

At any given time, I'm working on like 10 different projects. tmux lets me set up sessions for each of these projects, so that when I leave one and come back in a week, all the context is there (multiple windows, bash history, working directories I was in, etc) Since I work with big biological data, most of my work takes place on our university cluster, which means my laptop is just a dumb terminal and all of the action takes place on the server. IME, tmux is especially powerful with coupled with mosh, which gives a persistent SSH connection. That means I can be in the middle of a project, close my laptop lid, go home, then later that evening, open my lid and everything is reconnected and just right there. Same if I reboot my laptop - one command to reconnect my terminal with mosh, and I'm back in the middle of my complicated multi-window project.

trentnelson 2y ago
What happens when you press page up or down in tmux? Have you configured it to scroll page up & down? Or do you do that via Ctrl-B ] or whatever the magic incantation was?
- necrotic_comp 2y ago
  That's right. You have a prefix that lets you use page up page down in any pane you've got currently selected.
- donio 2y ago
  Not parent but keybindings are fully configurable. For example to scroll up with Shift-Pgup: bind -n S-PPage copy-mode -u bind -T copy-mode S-PPage send -X page-up bind -T copy-mode S-NPage send -X page-down The first line is a top-level binding to enter copy-mode and immediately scroll up one page. The other two add bindings within copy-mode so you can continue to scroll up or down with those keys. I also have a small hack in my .zshrc to start scrolling up with `M-v` (like in Emacs) while at a shell prompt: tmuxup(){tmux copy-mode -u} zle -N tmuxup bindkey '^[v' tmuxup
  - seanhunter 2y ago

kabr 2y ago

Saved terminal state. Multiple tabs. Can log off and come back and everything’s there. tmux and mosh are game changers, especially while tethering/roaming and switching networks.

Groxx 2y ago
Maybe one of the missing pieces here for anyone not terminal-fluent: Normally, when you lose your ssh connection to another machine, it'll kill your scripts, drop all the output into /dev/null, and you can't get any of it back. Because that's how a remote terminal normally works. So even brief connection issues are a major headache, much less known stuff like "close your laptop and resume after lunch". Tmux gets you what you would expect instead from a "remote tab" thing. Stable, reconnectable, still exists when you're not connected, etc. There are other options of course (there always are), but tmux does it all and it's an industry standard.
cxr 2y ago
That should be table stakes at this point; these features should be built into all conventional desktop terminal emulators. I shouldn't have to run a second, inferior text mode terminal emulator inside the terminal emulator app that ships with my preferred desktop environment (and deal with the conflicts/impedance mismatch that falls out of this pairing). Pretty nuts that so many desktops and independent modern terminal emulators lag so far behind GNU Screen, which was first released in 1987.
- michaelmior 2y ago
  Personally I'd much rather run that server-side. I use iTerm which has a lot of great features for session management, but I like being able to connect from any machine and keep the exact state I was in rather than having it tied to my local client.
- freedomben 2y ago
  I prefer tmux because I can run it on servers/remote machines too. It doesn't require X so runs perfectly and happily on headless machines. Can also be nested. I'm all for adding those features to the terminal emulators, but it will never meet and certainly not exceed tmux in flexibility, power, portability, and compatiblity.

PhilipRoman 2y ago

Aside from tabs/panes/persistence already mentioned, it serves as a portable, programmable layer that will work anywhere, whether on the client or server side. I set up my key bindings once and now they work over SSH from Windows, local terminal emulator, on a Linux framebuffer console or even through a serial port. While I do use a tiling/tabbing window manager, tmux is just really good at what it does so I still keep using it for my terminals.

bee_rider 2y ago

It provides all of the useful functionality of a window manager (hosting multiple terminals) but you can run it in a terminal.

freedomben 2y ago

lots of good answers already. my tldr: it's a terminal-agnostic tool to split a window vertically or horizontally so you have multiple shell sessions on the same screen (and can move between them). Lots of other great reasons too but that's the major one IMHO.

michaelmior 2y ago

Personally I find the small shell function below really helps my tmux workflow. Run it with no arguments and you'll get a list of available sessions. Run it with a session name and it will start the session if it doesn't exist or reattach if it does. If you're already in one tmux session, it will just switch over your client to that session. The function below will also automatically detach other clients, but for me it's what I want since other clients are always just me on another machine, often with a different screen size. tm () { if [ -z $1 ] then tmux list-sessions return fi tmux detach -s $1 2> /dev/null if [ -n "${TMUX+1}" ] then tmux switch-client -t $1 2> /dev/null || tmux new-session -s $1 else tmux attach-session -t $1 2> /dev/null || tmux new-session -s $1 fi }

artemave 2y ago
I have a better version (in the sense that it automatically names sessions after the current directory): if [ -z "$1" ]; then name="$(basename $PWD)" name="${name//\./-}" else name=$1 fi tmux has -t "=$name" && tmux attach -t "$name" && exit tmux new-session -d -s "$name" -n shell
- michaelmior 2y ago
  Better is subjective. This version has no way to easily list sessions. Depends on what you want :)

arlort 2y ago

Plenty of great use cases have already been pointed out, but what I also love is that sometimes I get carried away and use the close window keybind on the wrong terminal, with tmux set to create a new session when the terminal is launched (which isn't closed unless all shells in the sessions have excited) I just use a keybind to spawn a terminal attached to any unattached sessions and never again have to recreate 10 different panes in different working directories on different windows Also let's my colleagues monitor my builds on our shared server pretty easily and it's better than screen sharing

mostlysimilar 2y ago

I like tmux for keeping a remote session open but I don't use it for my local machine. On my local machine the only thing it would really buy me are tabs/split panes, and iTerm does those things natively and far better than tmux does.

TheAdamist 2y ago

I find the split screen capability very useful for terminal use, but i'm only a more basic user

jeppester 2y ago

A use case I haven't seen mentioned - from skimming the comments, is that multiple users can connect to the same tmux session. It does a good job at scaling the session to fit the size of each client's terminal window and has multiple scaling options available. In my experience it works way better than for instance terminal sharing in VS Code.

aloer 2y ago

Anyone here who can answer this as well in the context of local work on a Mac? I manually use tmux when sshing into servers but usually that’s one session split in two and that’s it. Locally I use iterm2 with a single hotkey window but multiple tabs with one per project and then up to 8 panes per tab. These stay open for many months until the inevitable restart for system updates. I feel like I have pretty good persistent terminals this way. But would there be any benefit for me using tmux locally? I know that iterm2 has some kind of integration with it but I‘ve not tried that

iLoveOncall 2y ago
I don't use tmux but I use screen which AFAIK is the same basic functionality on my Mac. I use it to run long lasting software during development, so the frontend and backend of the service I'm developing for example, since they have hot-reload. It's not _necessary_ but it's nice knowing I can close my terminals without worrying of having to wait for another 10m build because I like to keep my open windows to a minimum. I think it's really down to how you use your computer more than a real need.
rewgs 2y ago
> These (tabs and panes) stay open for many months until the inevitable restart for system updates. And iTerm won't have a way to restore them, right? The `tmux resurrect` plugin can save and restore all your sessions, even after restarts. At the moment I have 45 tmux sessions running and I'm not worried in the slightest about not being able to pick up exactly where I was for every project. Also, tmux is a nice way to "bury" your "windows." Hiding an iTerm window can only be done by covering something with it or minimizing it, but a tmux session can be detached from/attached to at will, and when you're detached it doesn't add cruft to your window management.
biftek 2y ago
I use tmux basically the same way but prefer tmux sessions because I find tabs hard to navigate reliably. With tmux I can assign a name to each session, list all sessions, and have keyboard shortcuts to take me to a specific session or create it if it doesn't already exist. <leader>+J always opens projectfoo, <leader>+K projectbar, etc. With tabs you need to know which tab contains what and what order everything is in.

mason_mpls 2y ago

tmux + vim with some plugins is a really good developer experience, it makes it really easy to leverage command line tools

digitalsushi 2y ago

why would you want browser tabs?